Six Sigma and Multitasking

photo credit: an untrained eye (is elsewhere)

I’ve mentioned before that Six Sigma certainly has its critics, and here are some more:

almost five dozen companies that have adopted Six Sigma and found that the vast majority have underperformed the stock market … while fully 86 percent of them use Six Sigma or similar continuous-improvement methodologies, they generally achieve only incremental gains … companies can’t rely on Six Sigma alone; they must regard it as a specialized tool suitable to certain needs but far from a cure-all … in the current business climate, which is focused on growth and innovation, Six Sigma’s emphasis on cost-cutting and efficiency might prove a harder sell. “Six Sigma is following the course of other methods, like Total Quality Management: after awhile you start seeing cracks in its armor,” he says. “Then something new comes along and companies rush to get it.”

Critics have long contended that the further Six Sigma strays from its manufacturing roots, the less effective it becomes.

I’m not sure if this is true, for example, Six Sigma and Lean have been appplied with success in a number of diverse situations such as healthcare and even government.

It seems to me that the problem is one of focus and “consistency of purpose” as Deming would have called it. We need to stop multitasking, jumping from initiative to initiative and concentrate on Six Sigma and/or Lean and really understand the philosophy behind these ideologies and commit to making them work because:

Despite the common belief that we have to multi-task to get our work done, and despite the presence of technology that encourages us to do more than one thing at a time, the reality is that we’re undermining our own ability to do a good job when we try to do two things at once.

Part of the problem is that Six Sigma is often oversold by eager consultants who invest huge sums in advertising the benefits without explaining the long-term difficulties faced in actually sustaining the necessary culture to make it work. Perhaps they need to read this post which suggests that:

Lean proposes to produce the goods when they are required by the market and in quantities which are required by the market. This is the base for pull manufacturing. Product is pulled by the demand created by the customer. Here there is no need for advertising to sell your products. No stock holding costs, WIP and other related issues.

What do you think?